Sabiha Çimen – Hafiz

July 18 – August 17, 2024
Fri and Sat 2 – 6 pm

Opening: Thursday, July 18, 2024 | 6 – 9 pm

LOOCK Galerie is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of Sabiha Çimen’s work in Germany. The exhibition will feature photographs from Hafiz: The Guardians of the Qur‘an, a striking series and photobook that offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of young Muslim girls who have dedicated themselves to memorizing the Quran.

Sabiha Çimen purchased her first camera in Mecca, Saudi Arabia and shortly thereafter began creating visual diaries of her life. After graduating from the Istanbul Bilgi University, where she received a Master’s degree in Cultural Studies in 2015, Çimen decided to pursue her passion for photography fulltime and to use the medium to explore her own life and the things around her, an autobiographical approach that she describes as therapeutic.

When she was a child, Çimen attended a Qur‘an school with her twin sister. Interested in seeing how her former school had changed once she had finished her university studies, she returned and felt inspired by the young girls there, known as Hafiz, a term used by Muslims to describe someone who knows the Qur’an by heart. She also felt compelled to photograph them, their surroundings, relationships, and, above all, their playfulness. Çimen would go on to do the same at other Qur’an schools over the next four years, resulting in Hafiz: Guardians of the Qur‘an (2017-2021). A selection of these images will be presented at the LOOCK Galerie between July 18th and August 17th at 171 Ackerstraße.

Çimen (*b. 1986 in Istanbul, Turkey) has been a member of Magnum since 2020. Her photographs were first shown in 2022 in „Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers of Magnum“ at the ICP in New York and „Jetzt: Magnum Photos“ at the Reinbeckhallen in Berlin. In November of that same year, she received the Paris Photo-Aperture First PhotoBook Award. A year later, she had her first solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Rotterdam. Her photographs are regularly published in The New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, Harper‘s Bazaar and Vogue, among other publications.